Tombstone Tuesday: Dennis O’Connell

I have many posts that are dedicated to my great-grandfather, Dennis O’Connell, and I am sure there are many more to come. You can read previous posts about Dennis and his personal documents that I have by clicking here. This post is many years in the making, I took me 10 years to find where he is buried and finally be able to visit. Last month, I made the journey to his home of Hudson Falls, NY with his granddaughter Terri (my aunt) and my cousin Tracy. The excitement I had at be able to find his final resting place is beyond words. My cousin made jokes about how I could go from being sleepy and cranky to over excited when we would drive into a cemetery and find what we were looking for.

When it came to looking for Dennis, I only knew the name of the cemetery is St. Paul’s in Hudson Falls, NY. I thought when I found his name indexed in a book that I drew a picture of the map and marked the section he was in. Nope, with the excitement of that find all I did was right down the section and plot number and I had no clue what to do once we got to the cemetery. St. Paul’s Cemetery is not large by any standard, but we probably spent the most time searching through this one, my guess is probably at least 1/2 hour.

Entrance to St. Paul’s Cemetery

We had not found any of the O’Connell family, so we decided to go to the very back of the cemetery where there was a handful of graves that we could see. My aunt and cousin had been way ahead of me. We had found so many headstones with the last name of Daha and I had decided to photograph all of them. I knew that one of my great-great aunts had married a Daha and I did not have any family information on them. I figured take the pictures today and figure the family out another time. I am so glad that I did this, if I had not, I probably would have missed the O’Connell graves. I found everyone that I knew would be there, and a few more. I will save those surprises for another day.

oh wow! I actually went to that cemetery a few weeks ago looking for a friend’s gravestone, and I went to the waaaaaaaaaay back because I couldn’t find her anywhere in the front, and I saw this headstone! 🙂